Steve Anderson wrote:
Yes, assuming two things. Firstly the soundcard can drive some small speakers or headphones quite loud. If it can't you'll need to add some form of amplifier (small) to it.
Secondly that the soundcard is quite accurate enough in frequency, I can't imagine one that would not be suitable for this purpose, they're usually crystal controlled.
Steve A.
True - unless you are playing out at a different sampling rate to it's native sampling rate (usually 48kHz), otherwise the timebase can drift quite a bit over time because it does on-board resampling. This is problematic for recording (because of the cumulative effect) but probably less so for playback where the monitors electronics will generally handle the drift well, and, I think, the error would be relatively insignificant for a strobe since it is more an instantaneous thing - perhaps it will rotate very slowly in the direction of the drift.
I always try to record/playback at the card's native sample rate. This is usually 48kHz but can be different on lesser known cards/codecs.
I would recommend that, at least, the signal for a stroboscope be played out at the same sample rate as your video (If you use NBTV The Big Picture! it will be played out at 48kHz, if from CD it will be 44.1kHz).